


Nightmares at House on the Hill

by Alexampersandra



Category: Betrayal at House on the Hill (tabletop game)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-15
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 14:27:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6011155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alexampersandra/pseuds/Alexampersandra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Regardless of their reasons for entering the house on the hill, our five heroes are there. They try to leave, but can't, and the house gets weirder and scarier until it becomes flat-out haunted by nightmares that want to escape the house as badly as they do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One, in which some of our heroes search for bugs, and others search for a grave.

Heather held up a wriggling, many-legged potential specimen and eyed it carefully. “Damn,” she muttered, and flung it back onto the knee-high bush she had recently plucked it from.  
“Careful, careful!” Professor Longfellow admonished her, shuffling across the dry grass to stand behind her, temporarily blocking the blazing sun for her.  
“Sorry, professor,” she murmured, and she mostly meant it. But it had been four hours and she was getting frustrated by her empty specimen jars.  
“It’s not the millipede’s fault that it isn’t the type we’re looking for,” Longfellow chided his intern gently, understanding and sharing in her dissatisfaction. He had only found one viable specimen himself today, and his other intern hadn’t found any, either.  
Heather sighed deeply, knowing that he was right, and sat back on her heels. She gazed around the landscape to give her eyes a break from the close-up plant inspection. With the insect-centric tunnel vision she had been developing all morning, she had forgotten about the house on the hill looming over them (but in the wrong direction to do anything about the sun). It was straight out of an Edgar Allan Poe poem, except this was a hot and sunny day, not a dark and stormy night.  
“Darrin, how are you doing over there?” He moved away from Heather, leaving her to the baking sun and her growing disappointment in her work.  
“Professor, please, it’s-“  
“Sorry, I know,” the Professor interrupted. “How’s it going, Flash?”  
Satisfied, Flash held up an empty jar. “Living the dream, Profe!”  
Longfellow chuckled at his intern’s indomitable optimism. Checking his watch, he promised the pair, “One more hour and we’ll stop for lunch, how does that sound?”  
Both students responded by way of a thumbs-up, Flash’s more enthusiastic than Heather’s.

Eva had tried to remain upbeat, but how positive a spin can you put on a trip like this? Kids can see through facades really easily, right? Did Zoë know she was being fake?  
Zoë had been very even-tempered about everything: the news of her parents’ death, the fact that Aunt Eva was adopting her, the past four months of major changes in her life like moving and switching schools.  
Eva, despite her professional alter ego Madame Zostra being psychic, never could have foreseen all of this going so well. Zoë was a remarkable child by all accounts. That was exactly why, when Zoë asked to visit her parents’ graves, Eva could hardly refuse. That had been on Wednesday. Eva’s promise that they would go on the weekend had been two-fold: partly, she had several psychic consultations already lined up, but also, she wanted some time to gauge Zoë’s feelings and motivations.  
Everyone said Zoë was an adult in an eight-year-old’s body. They also said she had been forced to do a lot of growing up to do in a short period of time, but Zoë had always been like that. It was hard to tell what she was thinking and feeling… unless she told you. She was as honest as she was reserved. Eva often found herself wishing more adults were like her niece.  
Zoë was studying a brochure for the graveyard that they had picked up at the unattended front gate. She was looking for the number of her parents’ grave.  
As Eva pulled into one of the many empty parking spots, Zoë uncapped a pen and carefully circled something on the map in the brochure.  
“Found it?” Eva asked her.  
“Mhm,” Zoë said, putting the pen back in the Day-Glo pink backpack in her lap and zipping it shut.  
Eva removed the key from the ignition and they both got out of the battered station wagon. She waited for Zoë to pull the delicate bouquet of daisies out of the backseat, and let her take the lead, watching her compare the map to her surroundings and find her heading.


	2. Chapter Two, in which one of our heroes injures himself and another injures someone else.

An hour later on the dot, Heather slowly unfolded herself from the awkward millipede-hunting crouch she had maintained all morning.  
“Lunchtime!” Flash announced when he saw her get up, as cheery about the prospect of food as he was about sitting in a field all day poking around for bugs… but that made sense, for a future entomologist. Heather only took this summer internship because all the medical ones filled up before she got her paperwork submitted. It could be worse, though. At least the professor was a nice guy, and Flash could be pretty funny. That made the tedious work more bearable.  
The trio gathered their jars and made their way back to the motorhome that served as their mobile lab for the summer.  
Professor Longfellow set himself to work making sandwiches in the kitchenette, while the interns arranged the still-empty jars in the boxes from whence they came.  
Heather held up the only jar with anything in it, and inspected the millipede inside. “Do you have the labels?” she asked Flash, who patted his pockets, then pretended to smack his forehead.  
“Must have left them outside,” he said, moving toward the door. “I’ll be back in a…” he paused for effect. “Flash,” he finished with a goofy grin, met with rolled eyes and a groan from Heather.  
As she was sliding the last jar into the box, she heard a strangled yelp from outside. The professor dropped the sandwich he had been assembling and dashed outside just ahead of Heather.  
Flash was on the ground, holding his left arm close to his chest. His signature omnipresent smile managed to shine through his winces of pain.  
“I tripped in a divot, landed on my wrist,” he explained. “Feels like a sprain, but I heard a pretty sickening crack, so there might be a fracture?”  
The professor took the injured hand and inspected it, and Heather ducked back into the motorhome to grab the first aid kit.  
As she pulled the battered white plastic box out of the cupboard over the refrigerator, she thought, “Ice!” She yanked a plastic bag from the box under the sink, and hastily pulled open the freezer door to find the ice bucket empty and the ice-maker’s switch in the “off” position.  
“Damn,” she muttered, and headed back outside.  
Handing it to the professor, she told him, “We don’t have any ice for the swelling.”  
“We don’t seem to have much of anything,” he replied, rummaging through the dingy first aid kit. “I’m a liability nightmare, bringing two freshman students to a remote site with such a useless first aid kit. We don’t even have a wrap bandage.”  
Heather’s shoulders sagged in further defeat, but Flash was not so easily discouraged. “We can MacGuyver something until I can get to a professional, right?” He was gingerly holding his damaged left arm in his right hand while the professor poked through their meager medical supplies.  
Inspired, Heather held up an index finger in a “hang on a second” gesture, and disappeared back into the motorhome. A moment later, she emerged, triumphantly brandishing a handful of dish towels and a roll of masking tape.  
“Excellent,” the professor said approvingly, and set to work on a makeshift splint for Flash’s wrist.  
“I can go ask at that house for some ice before we hit the road,” Heather offered. “It’s at least a half hour, probably more, to the nearest urgent care or hospital or anything… we should probably control the swelling so it doesn’t get too bad.”  
Professor Longfellow nodded. “That’s a good point. If that doesn’t work out, we can just stop at the first gas station we see for ice.”  
Heather took off jogging toward the classically creepy-looking house on the hill overlooking the field.

Eva hung back, taking advantage of the shade offered by the only tree in sight, while Zoë stood in front of her parents’ gravestones, bright pink backpack facing Eva, almost impossible to look at in the bright sunlight.  
She sighed and thought about how badly she wanted to be a true psychic, not just a sideshow act, so she could know what the little girl was thinking. Zoë hadn’t cried yet, and she hadn’t spoken since they left the car. If Eva asked, Zoë would tell her what she was thinking and feeling, but Eva didn’t want to intrude on her.  
Eva knew that Zoë got irritated by the question, “Are you okay?” so she had made a deal: she wouldn’t ask that question as long as Zoë promised to let her know whenever the answer would be no. She had to trust that Zoë would keep her end of the deal.  
So she kept out of the way and watched Zoë mourn quietly, flowers clutched to her chest.  
Eva pulled out her phone to check the time, and noticed that the little icons at the top indicated that she had no signal out here. That wasn’t too surprising; they were pretty much in the middle of nowhere.  
She had no idea why her sister was buried out here. If she had to guess, she’s say it was some family plot belonging to Zoë’s father, based on the number of gravestones she saw with Zoë’s surname, Ingstrom, on them.  
Zoë hadn’t budged an inch since she planted herself in front of the graves. Eva wanted to be patient and knew that it was her obligation as the adult here… but she was getting antsy. She decided to pace up and down a few rows and read headstones to keep herself occupied while Zoë did whatever Zoë needed to do.  
Eva read names and dates and excerpts of bible verses for three or four rows. In the middle of trying to calculate Edna Ingstrom’s age at the time of her death fifty-seven years ago, she heard Zoë call for her: “Aunt Eva?”  
Weaving through the gravestones, Eva returned to where Zoë was standing, and saw that she had carefully placed the flowers perfectly spaced between the two stones.  
“What’s up, kiddo?” she asked.  
“I’m ready to go now,” Zoë told her.  
“Sure,” Eva said, and led the way back to the car.  
“Do you wanna pick up some dinner on the way home?” she asked Zoë, wondering if that was appropriate small talk for the situation. Should she be asking serious questions? Parenting was hard.  
But it seemed to be fine, because Zoë engaged in the usual ritual of naming a bunch of restaurants that sounded good so they could whittle down their choices.  
They had narrowed it down to the Italian place around the corner from the house or fast-food Mexican food by the time they got back to the car.  
Eva reflected on how smoothly this had gone. Was it a good thing that there had been no tears? She would ask the therapist later in the week, just to be sure. If easy now meant terrible later, she’d rather not have easy now.  
She was lost in these thoughts as she pulled out of the cemetery gates and onto the road, and as she-  
-slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting the little boy who was sprinting into the street!  
Her first instinct was to check on Zoë, whose eyes were wide in shock.  
“I’m okay,” Zoë said quietly, to keep Eva from asking her. “Is he?”  
Eva put the car in park and jumped out to see.  
The boy seemed to be about Zoë’s age, and he was on his side, eyes closed. There were smudges of dirt and what looked like blood all over him and his clothes.  
He had been running down the hill where the creepy house overlooked everything in the area.  
Eva hadn’t noticed Zoë getting out of the car too, so she jumped when she heard, “We should take him up to that house.”  
Eva’s first instinct was that they shouldn’t move him in case he had a spinal injury, but the boy started to move around a little.  
“Honey?” she asked him. “Can you hear me?” Out of her new habit, she avoided asking if he was okay. She wondered if that would bother Zoë, for someone else to be asked that question.  
“I’m going to take you home, okay? We’ll get you some help.”  
The boy struggled against her for a moment, but then he passed out.  
She directed Zoë to open the back door of the car and she slid him into the backseat, then headed up the road to the house as quickly as she felt was safe on the winding dirt road.


	3. Chapter Three, in which three of our heroes enter the house on the hill.

Heather didn’t see a doorbell, so she knocked on the large, ornately carved wooden door, panting a little. She didn’t want to overreach, but she was considering asking for a glass of water for herself before she headed back down the hill with Flash’s ice. At least jogging down wouldn’t be as hard as the trip up.  
She knocked again, and waited as she caught her breath.  
No answer.  
The garage at the end of the road she had followed was closed, so she couldn’t be sure if anyone was at home or not.  
“One more try,” she promised herself. They could go to a gas station like the professor said, but now that she had thought of it, she badly wanted some water.  
“Come in!”  
The voice should have been muffled through the thick, heavy door, but Heather heard it clear as day, and didn’t hesitate.  
She heaved the door open and peered around inside. It was incredibly dark, compared to the bright sun outside.  
“Hello?” Heather walked in tentatively. “My friend is injured down the hill; I just came up here to ask if we could have some ice? You know, for the swelling? If it’s alright?” She didn’t know which direction to speak in, so she sort of faced the grand staircase straight ahead and let her voice echo around the entire entrance hall.  
“I can’t get around very easily,” answered the creaky voice she had heard so clearly from the porch, but she couldn’t identify what direction it came from. “Help yourself, the kitchen is to your right.”  
Heather had watched her share of horror movies. She knew she shouldn’t do things like wander around in a strange house under the direction of a disembodied voice. But she was thirsty and Flash was hurt. Besides, she was just going to grab some ice and water and go; nothing complex.  
“Um… thank you!” she called out to the house in general, and ducked into the first door on the right.  
As promised, it was the kitchen. That was a good sign, she convinced herself. If someone in the house wanted to hurt her, they would have told her to go through a door that led to something like a dungeon or a wine cellar where a cask of amontillado was waiting for her.  
It was dark in the kitchen, too, but a dim effusion of light got through the grimy little window over the sink.  
Heather squinted and found the refrigerator in the corner. She pulled the plastic bag out of her pocket and scooped ice out of the freezer until the bag was full.  
As she was zipping the bag closed, she heard a low growling sound behind her. It was so similar to the sound of trains passing behind her own apartment, she nearly ignored it, until she remembered she wasn’t in her own kitchen… and then, it was too late for her to react.  
“Ow!” she yelped, dropping the bag to grab her arm, and sending ice cubes skittering across the floor.  
Her arm felt warm and sticky. Blood?  
Carefully trying to avoid the ice she couldn’t see on the floor, she moved closer to the tiny, dingy window to get a better look at the wound. Now she could feel blood dripping off her elbow, and hear it plink, plink-ing into the sink. If the kitchen weren’t so dirty and disused, she would feel worse about bleeding all over it.  
Peering closer to her arm, she saw distinct puncture marks in a semi-circle… and a mirrored set of holes on the underside of her bicep.  
Did something bite her?  
Feeling woozy, she slumped onto the floor and closed her eyes.

Eva chose to leave the boy in the car while she went to the house to tell them what happened. She could get help carrying him, or if nobody was home, hop back in the car and take him to a hospital. If only she had phone service, she would call 911!  
It was an unusual thought, but she hoped that whoever was in the dark, creepy house was friendlier than horror movie tropes would suggest. What a silly, fleeting thought.  
Zoë insisted on coming with her; she didn’t want to be left in the car to be responsible for the boy.  
Eva pounded on the large front door. “Hello?” she called. “We have an emergency here!” She raised her arm to knock some more, but pulled it back when she heard a scream of “Ow!” come from inside.  
She looked to Zoë, whose wide-eyed look must have mirrored her own.  
Think, Eva, think. They had to go inside, even though it sounded dangerous. There had to at least be a phone inside, so they could call for help if nothing else. Should she leave Zoë outside? No way. The kid had abandonment issues enough; she would keep her close and tell her to run if there was reason to.  
Eva turned the doorknob slowly, almost hoping it would be locked so she would have a reason to turn and leave, and just head straight to a hospital. But the door opened easily, despite the great weight of the solid wooden door.  
“Stay close,” she said to Zoë, who didn’t need to be told twice. They crept inside as one entity, Zoë a tiny shadow of her aunt.  
They left the door open. Eva told herself that it was to let more light in, but she knew it was more about keeping their escape route open.  
“Hello?” she could hear the shake in her own voice. This wasn’t breaking and entering, was it? She was trying to help someone… two someones, in fact. That fell under some kind of good Samaritan law or something, didn’t it?  
“I heard a scream,” she continued when nobody answered. “I want to help, if I can? Anyone? Hello?”  
The entryway had four doors, not counting the half-open front door: two on the left, and two on the right. There was nothing in the foyer except large painted portraits on the walls, and an enormous, dusty red-and-gold rug that led from where they stood to the grand staircase.  
Seeing no phone or signs of who might have let out the scream or be responsible for the boy outside, Eva decided to try the doorways, clockwise starting on her left. It was arbitrary, but it was order, and it made her feel more in control of the bizarre situation.  
Leading Zoë by the hand, she squinted in the dimness and entered the first door on the left.  
They took a few steps into the room and Eva instructed Zoë, “Look around for the light.”  
But before they could even turn to face the doorway to check the walls for a switch, Eva stumbled, and there was a sharp CRACK! of splitting wood, and she was falling, falling through the floor, Zoë squeezing her hand tightly and tumbling with her down into nothingness.


	4. Chapter Four, in which the professor makes a new friend and Zoë finds something shiny.

Professor Longfellow had begun to question the wisdom of sending an eighteen-year-old girl up to a creepy horror-movie house by herself. By now, they probably would have found a gas station selling bags of ice. Ice wasn’t even that crucial; Flash’s swelling would go down on its own eventually. It just went slower than it would with ice. Instead, he and Flash were sitting in the motorhome, waiting for Heather to return.  
“Maybe we should drive up there, save her the trip back,” he considered aloud.  
“Good idea,” Flash agreed, adjusting the makeshift splint the professor had made from dish towels.  
The professor climbed into the driver’s seat and started the RV. Flash carefully took a seat at the little table that was holding all the specimen jars.  
“She must be inside,” the professor said as he parked in the empty driveway. “I don’t see her. I’ll go get her; you stay here.”  
“No, I’ll come with you,” Flash insisted.  
Professor Longfellow ran a hand over his thinning gray hair and didn’t argue. He just wanted to get Heather, get Flash to a medical professional, take Heather home, and take their lone millipede to the lab and write up his reports.  
Flash winced slightly at any step that jostled his injured arm, but he held it close to his chest and didn’t complain.  
The front door was hanging halfway open, swinging very slightly in the mild breeze when they got to the porch. It was unsettling.  
The professor stuck his head inside. “Heather? Hello? Is anyone there? I’m just getting my student, Heather, and we’ll get out of here. We don’t want to bother you…” He trailed off, knowing that he was rambling, a little like he so often did in his lectures.  
Flash gently pushed past him, opening the door wide and entering the house.  
The professor started to protest, but Flash pointed out, “We can’t leave without Heather. She told us she was coming here. The door is wide open but nobody answered us. We are perfectly justified in assuming that Heather is here and either out of earshot or in some kind of danger.”  
He said it all so logically and calmly, the professor stepped right over the threshold without any further hesitation. The kid could become a lawyer if he got bored with entomology.  
“Heather?” Flash called out clearly from the bottom of the grand staircase. “Come on; we need to go.”  
Still no answer.  
Flash turned back toward the front door, where the professor stood, but caught himself and stared into the doorway to the right of the stairs.  
“I think I just saw someone walk through there,” he said. “Hello? Heather?” He beckoned the professor with his good right hand and disappeared into the doorway.  
Longfellow followed, cautiously passing the first dark room on the right, and ducking into the second doorway behind Flash.  
It was just a dusty hallway. The professor coughed into the crook of his elbow; Flash’s footsteps had kicked up the thick layer of dust on the floor.  
Flash pointed at the doorway on the opposite side of the room from where they had entered. “I saw someone through here.” He led the way, and the professor followed, trying to breathe through his sleeve to avoid the dust cloud in Flash’s wake.  
They were in what looked like a ballroom now, big and open, and – thankfully – less dusty than the hallway.  
They walked around the room, poorly lit by flickering sconces on the walls, but there was no sign of whoever Flash saw.  
“Fire!” the professor exclaimed, pointing to a corner of the room that was pouring thick gray smoke. It was quickly filling the room, too quickly for them to pinpoint the exact source.  
“Find the door!” he told Flash. “And get low to the ground,” he added, as he crouched down himself and crawled to what he thought was the door they had entered through.  
When he stood and looked around, though, it was clear that he had gotten turned around and found the wrong door. He was in a dining room, with polished silver on the table and in the cabinet.  
“Flash, this way!” he called into the doorway he had just come through. “Follow my voice!” Even though it was the wrong way, they could go back in together and follow the wall until they found the right door. Then they could… what? Get to the RV, grab one of their phones, and call for a fire truck? It was weird; he hadn’t even seen flames, just an outpouring of smoke. But as they say, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. “Flash!” he called again. “This way, follow my…”  
He was interrupted by the tinkling of glass or crystal elsewhere in the dining room, and the creeping realization that he was not alone in it.  
Turning swiftly on his heels, Longfellow asked, “Who’s there?” He expected something angry, or maybe sarcastic, possibly punctuated by a gunshot, considering that he was the trespasser in this situation, no matter how Flash justified it.  
He would greatly prefer an answer in Heather’s voice, which would mean that this increasingly unusual excursion was one step closer to being over.  
The answer he got was neither. A man with wildly unkempt hair and a nervous tic that twitched his arms and shoulders stepped out of the shadows.  
“Blaggeh!” the man announced, sounding pleased that he had found the professor, who was backing away very slowly, avoiding making any sudden movements.  
“Erm…” The professor wasn’t sure of the correct response to that. “Your hallway seems to be filled with smoke.”  
The madman twitched his arms – or his arms twitched him, perhaps – and he murmured some nonsensical syllables. “Friend!” was the only intelligible thing he said, and he said it while coming around the large dining table to stand near the professor.  
Neither of them said or did anything for a long moment, eyeing each other: the professor suspiciously, the madman happily.  
The professor broke the silence by calling out, “Flash? Can you hear me? Just follow my voice, come meet…?”  
The madman offered no name, only a smile and a bit of frothy spittle at the edges of his mouth.  
“…someone,” the professor finished awkwardly.

Eva sat up slowly, sorely. She patted her arms, legs, torso, head… nothing seemed badly injured, though she could definitely expect several wicked bruises to crop up later.  
“Zoë?” she asked the darkness.  
The room was suddenly flooded with pale, bluish fluorescent light. Zoë had her hand on a light switch just higher than her head.  
Squinting, Eva said, “Good job, kiddo. Are you…” She stopped just short of asking the forbidden question. “Hurt?” she asked instead.  
“I don’t think so,” Zoë answered. “I bumped my head on the floor and I have scrapes on my hands like when I fell off my bike last year but I’m okay.”  
“Good,” Eva said. “I think we’re in the basement.” Peering straight up, she could see the jagged edges of what must have been a hole in the floor in the room they had entered, the tiniest bit of light visible through it. Looking around the room, she saw a door on each wall, a few boxes in corners, and not much else. It was mildly chilly despite the blazing sun outside, and there was the faintest scent of mildew and some kind of chemical smell Eva couldn’t quite place.  
“What do you say we get the hell out of here?” Eva proposed to her niece, who inexplicably giggled. Eva gave her a funny look.  
“You talked to me like an adult,” Zoë explained.  
Eva hadn’t ever gotten the hand of talking to kids, so she would say things like “Who gives a damn?” and “Get the hell out of here” when more parentally-minded adults would say, “Who cares?” and “leave.”  
Eva laughed too, and gingerly pulled herself to her feet.  
“Which door should we try first?” she asked.  
Zoë thought about it with a very serious, contemplative look on her face, and settled on the one next to the light switch she had flipped.  
“Good choice,” Eva agreed. She turned the knob and pushed the creaky door open. She was met with a wave of warm air, which seemed promising: if warm air rises, then the stairs to the ground floor would be warmer than the basement, right? She waved Zoë in behind her.  
There was a deep orange glow radiating from one far corner of the room, casting ominous shadows everywhere. The heat was coming from the same source as the light. This definitely wasn’t the stairway up to the ground floor. This was a furnace room. The chilly, damp smell of mildew had been replaced by a hot, smoky scent that Eva could almost feel leaching into her clothes and hair.  
The doorway to their right had light behind it. “Let’s try that one,” Eva said, heading toward it.  
As she pushed on the door, she turned and saw that Zoë was crouched on the floor, cupping something in her hands.  
Eva made a quick, fervent wish that the answer to this question was not any kind of insect or rodent, and asked, “What do you have there?”  
Zoë turned and stood in one slow motion and held out a small, round, flat object. It looked sort of like a gold coin, or a medallion. There was some complex symbol inscribed on it that Eva didn’t recognize, even with her extensive study of Tarot cards and Ouija boards. Although Zoë was reverently holding it almost perfectly still, the flickering light of the furnace made it look almost alive.  
“Put it back where you found it,” Eva told Zoë in her best mom-voice. “This house is weird and creepy… and dangerous… but it’s still someone’s home… probably. That belongs to them.”  
“Okay,” Zoë said, emotionless, staring at the symbol cupped in her hands like it was holy to her.  
“Put it back,” Eva reiterated, “and let’s go.” She pushed open the door and walked into the better-lit room beyond it.  
Zoë followed her, but not before slipping the symbol into the pocket of her sundress surreptitiously.


	5. Chapter Five, in which some interesting objects are found... and kept.

Heather came to on the kitchen floor with a start. Pain… arm… bite? What happened?  
She should probably get out of there. Forget the ice; she probably had rabies or something now. She was going to get checked in at the hospital right alongside Flash.  
It felt like the bleeding had stopped, at least. Heather carefully pulled off her button-up shirt and wrapped it tightly around her wounded bicep. The blood had already soaked the sleeve from lavender to a deep, dark red that looked black in the poorly-lit kitchen, but her tank top seemed to be untouched.  
With her good left arm, Heather pulled herself up using the countertop, then held herself up while a wave of wooziness and nausea passed.  
Good thing the walk down the hill would be easier. She just had to get back to the front door…  
She walked slowly, remembering that she had dropped ice everywhere and not wanting to slip and fall and add new injuries to the day’s list. Holding on to furniture and walls for support, she got back into the entrance hall and looked around. The many doors swam in her vision. This shouldn’t be this hard, she told herself. Just pick the right door… right? She went right, toward the grand staircase. That didn’t seem right. Wait… not right? That’s left. She picked the door just to the left of the stairs.  
Big mistake.  
This was certainly not the front door because Heather didn’t remember the front porch being a dark room that reeked of warm iron. She could hear a wet dripping sound from somewhere in the room. Was it moving around? Or was she?  
The door swung shut behind her. She tried to open it back up, but something wet coated the doorknob and it was too slippery to turn.  
She moved further into the room and bumped into a small table. Falling forward a little, her hand landed on a candle. Feeling around, she found a book of matches near it. It took several tries, but she managed to light a match, and then the candle, and get a better look at the room… which she immediately regretted.  
If Heather thought she had left a lot of blood in the kitchen, it was nothing compared to this room. The walls were slathered in it like a careless interior decorator had mistaken it for paint. The carpet was squishy with it. It dripped from the ceiling in at least a dozen different places. It was genuinely surprising to Heather that the candle and matches weren’t too bloody to be lit.  
She picked up her feet and inspected the soles of her boots and found them painted with a thick layer of warm red blood.  
There were two other doors. Despite the sinking feeling in her stomach – which was from a combination of feeling like she was standing in the house’s exit wound and knowing that she had no choice but to move deeper into the world’s weirdest house – she crossed the room, carpet squelching sickeningly under each step, and chose the door with the lever-shaped doorknob, since the round ones were too slick to open.

Flash was on the ground, like the firefighters had taught everyone in elementary school. He was crawling slowly toward what looked like a door, trying to keep his injured wrist out of his way and the smoke out of his lungs.  
He could hear the professor calling to him: “Follow my voice! This way, to the door!” He was pretty sure it was coming from this door. Why would the professor shut the door behind him, though? Oh well… a door that led out of this smoke-filled room was Flash’s priority; he could worry about whether it was the right door once he was through it.  
When he finally reached the door, he took a deep breath as close to the floor as he could, and stood up, quickly opening the door and stumbling into the next room, coughing and trailing wisps of smoke behind him. He shut the door to contain the smoke, and looked around for the professor.  
He wasn’t in this room, which he thought looked similar to the other hallway, the one that would have been the way back out to the entrance hall, but this one didn’t have the thick layer of dust on everything.  
“Did someone clean in here…?” he wondered.  
He could hear the professor’s voice again; it was coming from the door on the right, he was certain this time. This house was starting to feel like a maze, and Flash felt a pang of genuine concern about ever getting out of it.  
“Strength in numbers,” he reassured himself, and made getting to the professor the first, manageable step of his escape plan.  
As he crossed the room, the floorboards creaked and moaned loudly in a way that made it sound like he was causing them a great deal of pain.  
He began to move quickly, wanting to hear as little of that wretched cacophony as possible, and dashed through the door.  
Now he was in a library, the kind you only find in old, haunting mansions, filled with books that are probably mostly first editions that haven’t been read in generations, or perhaps mysterious tomes of spells and potions.  
Every square foot of every wall was covered with shelves full of books, statuettes, and haphazard stacks of yellowing papers, broken only by the two doorways: the one Flash was standing in, and one centered in the wall to his right.  
The flickering light that trickled down from the chandelier high overhead showed no sign of the professor, but Flash was certain this was where he had heard him.  
“The floor…” A raspy whisper that almost seemed to originate from inside his own head. “I’m under the floor…”  
Was that the professor? Flash wasn’t sure if he had ever had occasion to hear the professor whisper anything… it could feasibly be him.  
Did he say he was under the floor? There must be a basement. So where were the stairs? Flash began to pace the room, grateful that these floorboards didn’t creak in agony.  
“I’m under the floor…” the whispery voice repeated. “Buried under the floor.”  
Buried?!  
Something in Flash snapped into actin and sent him into a frenzy. Sprained wrist be damned, he was going to pull up every floorboard in the house if he had to, to find the professor.  
“Buried in the floor!” the whisper urged him.  
His hands clawed at the floor, throwing aside the corners of the rugs and digging his fingernails into the edge of any floorboard not perfectly flush with its neighbor.  
“Under the floor, I’m under the floor!”  
By the time he found one that gave way, he had cracked several fingernails to the point of bleeding and gotten a few nasty splinters on the palm of his already-injured hand.  
As he gazed into the small space unearthed by the removal of the floorboard, he could feel blood pounding in his ears, drowning out the last, fading vestiges of the panicked whisper.  
The same sound was echoed in the throbbing in his wrist… Why had he done that? The professor clearly wasn’t under the floor. In fact, he could hear him now in the next room, having a conversation with someone.  
Before Flash got up to go join the professor and whoever he was talking to – Heather, hopefully – a glint of greenish-gold winked at him from inside the hidden floor compartment.  
Flash reached in with his good hand – which was a little scraped and bloody for being the “good” hand – and pulled out a brightly polished stone.  
Every logical thought in his head told Flash that this stone didn’t belong to him. That something hidden like this was probably very valuable to whoever stashed it away. That he should put it back and get to the professor, Heather, and the front door of this weird house.  
Flash’s hands apparently weren’t very interested in logic, though, so he pocketed the stone and slid the floorboard and rug back into place. He felt more peaceful with the smooth stone in his possession, like it was imbued with luck, despite the very weird turns the day had taken.

After many attempts at conversing with the babbling madman, Professor Longfellow had concluded that he was friendly and harmless, if a bit off-putting.  
The man hadn’t answered any questions with anything other than mumbles, nonsense, or twitching and tugging at the frayed edges of his ragged clothing. The only recognizable word he had said since “friend” had been something that sounded like “skip,” so that’s what Longfellow had decided to call him. He didn’t protest.  
“Any chance you know the way out of this house, Skip?” His new companion’s response, which was to twitch his left arm and say “Hrm ba!” was less than useful.  
“Okay, I’ll try this door, then,” the professor said, heading for the door not concealing a room full of choking smoke.  
Skip followed Longfellow, and the professor didn’t try to stop him. An asylum escapee – or whatever this guy was – seemed better company than nobody.  
Behind the door was a beautiful library, and… Flash! The professor sighed with relief.  
“So glad to see you got out of there,” he told Flash. “What happened to your hands?” he asked, concerned about the tiny scratches and trickles of blood.  
“Oh…” Flash said, seeming to notice them for the first time. “Crawling on the floor, y’know?” He held them up and shrugged. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”  
After the professor introduced Flash and Skip, they compared notes and determined that they should go back the way Flash had come and pick a different door, see if they could circumvent the smoky room.  
With Skip trailing happily behind them, they creaked across the hall. Flash winced with every step, as though something about the floorboards made him nervous.  
Flash identified the door that had the smoky ballroom behind it, and the professor picked the door straight across from it and opened it, to find gardens beyond it.  
The fresh air was nice after the smoky ballroom. Although they were outside, it was… dark? And cool. They couldn’t possibly have been in the house long enough for the sun to have gone down already.  
The garden was enclosed entirely by the house, with brick exterior walls on three sides and a tall black fence with a gate in it on the other end.  
“Maybe that’ll help get us out of here,” the professor said, pointing out the gate to Flash. “They wouldn’t bring gardening things through the house, right? They’d have exterior access somehow.”  
If Flash’s optimism hadn’t been restored thanks to the lucky stone in his pocket, he might have remarked on the absurdity of trying to make this crazy house follow the rules of logic.  
As if to drive this point home, a man appeared in the gardens, where there had definitely been nobody a second before. He was wearing overalls and a flannel shirt, dusted with soil and green patches of grass stains. He was shoveling soil around a small bush just off the stone pathway that connected the door to the gate.  
“Hello!” Flash called to the groundskeeper, who looked up from his work and scowled at the trio. Skip whimpered quietly from behind the professor.  
“We’re looking for… well, a couple things now,” the professor began to explain, realizing how complicated things had gotten. “My intern, Heather, she came looking for some ice, and we could use some information on how to get out of the house. We seem to have gotten turned around. Oh and there’s a great deal of smoke in the…”  
He cut off when the groundskeeper started to charge straight up the pathway, wielding his shovel over his head like a battle-axe and screaming like a Viking running into battle.  
“What the hell!?” the professor yelled, holding his arms up defensively in front of his face, because that was all he had time to do.  
Skip and Flash both screamed.  
There was a long wait. Was his life supposed to be flashing before his eyes? Was he already dead, and the Grim Reaper was going to tap him on the shoulder any second now and explain how the afterlife worked? He hesitantly lowered his arms, just in time to see the groundskeeper disappear into thin air just inches from his face.  
“Ahh!” the professor yelled and, startled, fell backward onto the tones.  
“Wait, but… huh?” That was Flash. Skip was just nervously muttering and twitching his fingers while he looked around for the disappearing groundskeeper.  
The professor shook his head, bewildered. He sat forward on the ground and saw muddy footprints that could only have been left by the groundskeeper, or his apparition, or whoever that was. One of the footprints was larger than the others… there was something hidden in the mud.  
He crawled forward and put his hand in the weird footprint – well, weirder than the other footprints left by an unreasonably furious groundskeeper’s ghost – and pulled out a shallow wooden bowl with a perfectly fitted flat lid. He swiped away the mud with his fingers and scraped it onto the stones.  
“Healing salve,” the professor read aloud. He pulled the lid off to find a thick, gritty paste that smelled like mint and cold winter nights.  
He held it up to Flash. “Want to try it?” he offered.  
Flash shrugged agreeably. At this rate, the salve would probably make him sprout extra ears, or bleed from his eyes, or turn into a ghostly groundskeeper with anger management issues himself. But hey, what the hell? It might give him premonitions that would tell him how to get out of here instead. And with his lucky stone, he felt like it would at least do what it promised, and heal his wounds.  
Skip helped the professor up off the ground.  
Longfellow dipped two fingers into the gritty, gray-green paste and applied a thin layer of it to Flash’s hands. He also unwrapped the dish towel splint and applied some to the sprained wrist.  
“Is it working?” he asked, and Flash nodded.  
“It’s cold, and it kind stings a little on the cuts, but I think it’s helping,” Flash said, waiting for weird side effects but experiencing none.

Eva led Zoë into the next room, which was piled high with boxes and furniture and trinkets. It was hard to see around, but the glow of the furnace room behind them showed Eva a flashlight atop a pile of newspapers near the door. “Fire hazard,” she muttered, and flicked on the flashlight.  
Her first instinct was to look for a light switch, but she couldn’t see any of the walls because of the piles of junk.  
There was a narrow path just wide enough for Eva to squeeze through between the towers of boxes.  
As Eva wound her way through the room, checking to make sure Zoë wasn’t getting lost behind her, something glinted in the reflected light of her flashlight. She tried to ignore it; she couldn’t lecture Zoë on leaving the homeowner’s property alone and then turn around and start rummaging through their junk room for shiny objects that caught her eye.  
But it kept catching her eye, over and over. It was distracting her. She had to get a good look at it, just so she could dismiss it and move on to finding the way out.  
She gingerly slid around boxes, inhaling musty cardboard dust. She fixed the flashlight’s beam on the glinting object as she moved closer to it.  
When she could get a good look at it, she almost laughed out loud: a crystal ball, just like the one she stared into for hours each day as Madame Zostra, pretending to see her clients’ dead loved ones or their successful future endeavors.  
But this one was different. It was doing unusual things. Shapes… faces… symbols. She was really seeing things in this one, like it was the real deal.  
Eva was completely entranced. She let the flashlight drop to her side, but she could still see clearly into the depths of the crystal ball.  
Eva was too mesmerized by the contents of the ball to notice, but she was murmuring nonsense in a deep, other-worldly voice, and it was terrifying Zoë.  
The little girl was slowly backing away from Eva, winding backwards through the box maze, where she intended to hide until her aunt snapped out of it. She found another door before she found a good hiding place. Maybe it she showed Aunt Eva the next room, it would snap her out of the trance and they could move on. The crystal ball at home never did this to her; it was really weird and scary and she wanted it to stop.  
The room Zoë found looked like nobody had set foot in it for considerably longer than Zoë had even been alive.  
“Aunt Eva, I found… a room!” she called back into the junk room. It didn’t really matter if this was the room they wanted; it only mattered if Zoë could bring Eva back to reality and out of her creepy trance.  
A puff of dust rose up in the middle of the room, and Zoë spun around in surprise. Then something warm and wet touched her hand, which she yanked away.  
“Ack!” she cried, but then she saw what had touched her.  
The dog wagged his tail and jumped a little when Zoë acknowledged him with an excited “Puppy!”


End file.
